欢迎光临皇冠网！

皇冠网

Well, there are two very separate issues here to discuss. In part they have to do with Adorno’s preference for what today would be called “high culture” and his dismissal of “popular culture.” In this respect, his critique of jazz provides an interesting example. On the one hand, the critique is really very reductive.While translating Adorno, I had a discussion with the eminent historian, Eric Hobsbawm. He was an English Marxist historian at Birkbeck College in London, who came from an Austrian family and had been born in Alexandria, Egypt. but he was originally Austrian and so knew German very well (as well as French). His books on modern European history have rightfully become classics. For me, as a young graduate student with little international experience, he seemed the epitome of the British Don, pipe and all. I sought him out because I knew he published jazz reviews in the New Statesmanunder the name, Francis Newman. Since he had the Germanic background, he could read the Adorno in the original. Practically no one in England could do that (George Steiner and a few others – usually emigres – excepted). So I met with Hobsbawm at one point. He was gracious and ironic. I recall him saying that “it’s great that you’re translating Adorno. He’s very good, but he knows nothing about jazz.”He had read Adorno’s brief and highly critical essay on jazz in Adorno’s Prisms. I have to say that when I reread it, I find elements that I think should be taken seriously. But of course the overall argument and condemnation is terribly reductive. One could have expected Adorno to have been much more sympathetic to jazz givewn the role of improvisation, since improvisation, variation was something like what he was looking for. But of course jazz could not be “reconciled” with the inner “formal-law” of music, as it informed the two Vienna Schools, from Beethoven to Schoenberg. But again, it’s a question of repetition, or rather of not seeing repetition as generative of differences.

Professor Weber studied with Paul de Man and Theodor W. Adorno, whose book, Prisms, he co-translated into English. The translation of, and introduction to Theodor Adorno's most important book of cultural criticism helped define the way in which the work of the Frankfurt School would be read and understood in the English-speaking world. Professor Weber has also published books on Balzac, Lacan, and Freud as well as on the relation of institutions and media to interpretation.

Integration and Subversion: The Frankfurt School's Theory of Mass Culture, or the Dialectics of Mass Culture. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2005.

That strikes me as correct, but a bit too abstract, universal, and general. This would amount to something like a “negative”, non-conceptual teleology. Adorno would have agreed, I think, but the relation of such a negative teleology to historical practice remains problematic, not sufficiently elaborated. One cannot avoid a certain degree of generality, of course. But everything depends on how such generalities relate to singular events and processes. For example, Derrida’s notion of iterability is also general, but he says this is not a concept, but something that has to be played out. And such “play” involves not just cognition, knowledge, but something that exceeds them: it involves feeling, sensitivity, receptivity – what Derrida following Levinas will call “hospitality.”In the background of such a discussion is the way one conceives of repetition. One of the big differences between Derrida and Adorno, but also between Benjamin and Adorno, is that Adorno construes the notion of repetition, for some reason, only from the side of identity.He takes a term borrowed from Benbjamin, “Das Immergleiche” – what is “always the same” or “like” -- and doesn’t see it even as dialectical. What is “like” – gleich – is not the same only but also includes “unlike”. This ambivalence of repetition is the subject of Kierkegaard’s book on repetition.Adorno barely mentions it in his study of Kierkegaard He acknowledges that “Kierkegaard has some interesting things to say about repetition. But if I were to go into that, here we would go beyond my project, which is to critique Kierkegaard as the thinker of inwardness.” He acknowledges it but does not develop its implications – and this may be one of his greatest intellectual shortcomings. It could have helped me refine his notion of the non-identical and bring it closer to concrete practices.

Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012)

Horkheimer had an assistant who was very bright and learned. He was a former Jesuit and he looked and spoke like one. His name is Karl-Heinz Haag. He wrote in an Adorno Festschrift an article called “Das Unwiederholbare,” meaning “the unrepeatable.” I wrote about that, saying that what Adorno and possibly Horkheimer did not fully understand was what Kierkegaard quite literally called the “dialectics of repetition”. Namely, that the unrepeatable is also repeatable—the singular is unrepeatable, but it can only be accessed and experienced in and through repetition: which is to say, as something different and other than itself.Adorno came closest to this in his thoughts on mimesis – again largely inspired by Benjamin. Mimesis involves repetition, but is not the same as what it mimes. So repetition can become not just mass production of the same, which both Adorno and Benjamin criticized.But as I once quoted from Benjamin’s “Epistemo-critical Preface” to his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama), where he insists that the problem of origin has to be thought through the relation of singularity to repetition: the singular repeats itself, but in so doing alters itself as well.The two that it must be thought together. I am not sure that Adorno understands that.

A

I think so, since he had a sense of the unbridgeable difference between the noumenal and the phenomenal, between reason and the understanding, and between the things for themselves and things for us. I have discussed Benjamin’s connection with Kant in a book. In his early essay, “Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie,” Benjamin argues that “the coming philosophy” has to rethink Kant, not strictly in relation to cognition in relation to the notion of experience. It has to take the notion of experience and understand that it is much broader than just knowledge and cognition. It’s not just epistemological. Benjamin – in some ways like Heidegger, whom he destested – is “epistemocritical”, the title he gives to his Preface to his book on The Origins of German Mourning Play. For Kant experiences are understood from the point of view of what he calls the “cognitive faculties.” Against that, Benjamin argues that experience must be thought of in terms of an irreducible finitude and singularity. Peter. Fenves and some others have done a lot of work showing concretely Benjamin’s connection with one of his teachers, Heinrich Rickert. The notion of bare life that Agamben has taken from Benjamin and popularized comes from Rickert, who was a leading Neo-Kantian. He was also the professor of Heidegger. He developed a sympathetic and complicated critique of Bergson’s Lebensphilosophie in Die Philosophie des Lebens: Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit. Benjamin is very aware of this complex issue of extending the epistemological critique to a critique of the episteme, of the notion of knowledge on the basis of finitude. It’s somewhat parallel to Heidegger. For example, you have to rethink the question of life from the perspective of the singular, finite being. And that also opens Benjamin up to the question of language and signifying. I’m repeating a little bit what I said in my talk at Beijing Normal University. Benjamin and Heidegger were both writing their Habilitation – second doctoral dissertation that qualifies for a University Professorship -- on the essay of Thomas of Erfurt (then falsely attributed to Duns Scotus) on the modes of signifying – a concept that Benjamin adapts in his theory of translation and also in his theory of allegory. Benjamin is much more critical about the notion of knowledge per se—that is the aspect of Kant that he emphasizes, in part against the Neo-Kantians. Adorno was aware of this as well, of course, but he sought to interpret it from the point of view of a dialect, which, however negative, is still oriented on form of comprehension: a negative form. Both Adorno and Benjamin understood that being a poet – or a musician -- is not just being a deficient philosopher. But they gave different accounts of wherein the difference resides.

The questions about reconciliation just reminded me of a quite contradictory point by Adorno. The first article in his Prisms, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” ends with a famous statement: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” There were many debates about or misunderstandings of this sentence. I wrote an article called “The Antinomy of Art, or Adorno’s ‘Vibration’ ” two years ago. This article explores Adorno’s relevant explanations and responses and reads this statement as a theoretical puzzle that he raised about antinomy. How do you see this famous statement?

You once wrote a monograph on Benjamin—Benjamin’s Abilities, and we can feel that you often refer to Benjamin in your talk this time at Beijing Normal University. How would you say about the difference between Adorno and Benjamin in the Frankfurt School? Given your own studies especially the concept of singularity, do you prefer Benjamin to Adorno?

Adorno has been very important in helping me set up a general framework and in many ways I believe that my notion of a “monotheological identity paradigm” could be seen as an elaboration of Adorno’s critique of “Western” rationality. In other words, when I suggest that there is a continuum that goes from the Bible, through the Old Testament, the New Testament, Descartes, and so on—that’s a more Adorno-and Horkheimer-type gesture, as articulated for instance in their Dialectics of Enlightenment. But in terms of actually working with texts, Benjamin has been perhaps even more important.Even though Benjamin rarely subjected texts to a comprehensive “close reading,” the notion he develops at the end of his essay on translation, of a “word-by-word rendition of syntax” as opposed to a paraphrase of the “meaning” strikes me as decisive. On the other hand, I have a very hard time sharing the messianic notion of critique that Benjamin has – or for that matter, Derrida’s perhaps more complex notion of “messianicity without messianism.”Despite the Levinasian interpretation of the messianic, in which it is sharply distinguished from the more familiar, mainly Christian notion of the term. I am not at all certain that the term can be separated from its salvational connotation. On the other hand, Adorno’s notion, taken from Hegel, of “Versöhnung” – an ultimate “reconciliation” – is perhaps even more indebted to the Christian, salvational notion of the messianic. In contrast with all three – Adorno, Benjamin and Derrida – I don’t believe the messianic can be separated from the salvational, and also that things can or should be “saved” in the way most notions of the messianic imply.The poetry of Hölderlin, which is certainly informed by a certain messianic desire, may furnish the most powerful testimony to the power of that desire but also to its dangers. And Benjamin’s book on the Mourning Play and its “origins” has been probably one of the most important books that I read, because of the way he links the failure of Christian Messianism to historical events such as the Reformation, the Counter-reformation, and above all to their effects upon theatre and language.I find all this very infinitely suggestive. I feel I’m working within that framework as well. Except for the “happy end” of the book, where allegory allegorizes itself into a figure of salvation. This bears witness to the power of the messianic desire, but also to its nihilistic implications. And no dialectic can undo those implications or raise them to a higher level.

The connection between “barbaric” and “Wörter aus der Fremde” you made sounds very refreshing. I’d like to ask you another relevant question. Adorno once wrote a famous article “Der Essay als Form,” but it’s difficult to translate the word “essay” into Chinese. The current translations include “suibi” (casual literary notes), “sanwen” (prose), “lunshuowen” (argumentative exposition), and so on, but none of them seems ideal to me. How do you understand essay as a genre alongside Adorno’s contexts or his writing style? Perhaps your understanding can help us find a more precise Chinese equivalent of “essay.”

About the Authors

Yong Zhao

In and Out of the Frankfurt School: the Intelligentsia and the Mass Culture. Beijiing: Peking University Press, 2016.

I haven’t read it for a long time, so I have to reread it. But these translations don’t sound right to me. Adorno would be defending the essay as having its own coherence without pretending to be a systematic totality.At the same time, I can’t remember if he says it, but the word essay in English, also as in German, initially means an attempt, in German Versuch. Two important texts of Adorno have that word in their title: Versuch über Wagner, and Versuch, das Endspiel zu Verstehen. Especially the latter titles could be translated as “Attempt to Understand “Endgame”. So an Essay is also an attempt. In old English the word was spelled “assay.” It is in principle not finished. It’s an experiment.For example, Kierkegaard has book on repetition in Danish, which I think uses the word “forsøg,” the Danish word for “Versuch.” It can be translated as experimental, but then you think of it as a scientific experiment. That’s not what’s meant. The word experiment in older German is also “Versuch.” So the essay is something tentative, incomplete, but not loose. Adorno wouldn’t have accepted that. He would want everything to be tightly argued.As for “argumentative,” the word “argument” in English can be also demonstration, which already implies a firm position, whereas the essay is more like a search. The question is whether the knowledge is secure and definitive, or relative and tentative. I like to think that Adorno would have insisted that a attempt that recognizes itself as such is more rigorous than one that presents itself as successful or complete.

A

Walter Benjamin (1892.7.15 - 1940.9.27)

Samuel Weber

11

While I was writing my dissertation, I once thought about Adorno and Benjamin’s debate mainly on the philosophical and aesthetic levels. Do you think there are other reasons that lead to their differences?

A

Professor Yong Zhao received his Ph.D in literature in Beijing Normal University where he teaches now and is the Director of Institute of Literary Theories Studies as well as the Professor of School of Chinese Language and Literature, BeijingNormalUniversity. His research interests include the first group scholars of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin，Leo Löwenthal，Herbert Marcuse, and theories and criticism in contemporary Chinese literature and popular culture.

The Specter of Shuli Zhao: Among the Publicity, the Literariness and the Localness. Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2018.

Samuel Weber is an American philosopher and one of the leading thinkers across the disciplines of literary theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. He is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities and the co-director of the Paris Program in Critical Theory at Northwestern University as well as the Paul de Man Chair at The European Graduate School / EGS.

Q

Benjamin’s-abilities.Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Main works (selected):

Q

In the case of Dylan, I think the award of the Nobel Prize for literature is ridiculous. But this is hardly the first time that it has been so and this is by far not the worse award they have given.Some of the greatest writers never got the prize. I’m a great admirer of Dylan, particularly the early music and lyrics, which cannot be separated. But I don’t think it’s great literature. It is very tied to a specific historical situation, and its ability to survive that situation strikes me as limited. I may be proven wrong, of course. There is no doubt that he was a very innovative songwriter. I just don’t think that confusing his songs with literature is very helpful. They are sui generis. If the Nobel Prize people want to create a Nobel Prize for song-writing, I would be all for giving one to Dylan – and to many others Ditto by the way for jazz. I’m a great admirer of jazz. Too bad there is no Nobel Prize for it.

Is Benjamin closer to Kant?

所发文章未经批准，不走转载

10

Original English title: “Personal Experience about the Frankfurt School: From ‘Non-identity’ to ‘Singularity’—An Interview with Samuel Weber by Yong Zhao”

Q

本期编辑：高竞闻

打开全文

Q

A

07

Oct. 17th, 2016, Beijing

As I already mentioned, Adorno urged his students not to simply take as the last word Hegel’s a very scornful critique of Kant. For example, in the introduction of Phenomenology Of Mind, Hegel says that Kant doesn’t understand the didactic. Adorno’s philosophy students were completely Hegelian at that time, but Adorno insists that Kant is a very important thinker of non-identity. So he’s not just Hegelian or against Kant.

原标题：亲历法兰克福学派：从“非团结”到“独异” ——塞缪尔·韦伯访谈录（英文版·下）

Finally, I’d like to ask you to talk about the recent news. It was announced a few days ago that Bob Dylan got this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Adorno was a critic of pop music and jazz, and he perhaps didn’t like rock music. In your opinion, how would he comment on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize?

Gilles Louis Réné Deleuze (1925.1.18 - 1995.11.4)

Well it’s not the same exact debate. It’s a very difficult issue, which relates to the experience of history – the experience, and not just to its aesthetic or philosophical concept. Adorno was very comfortable in New York, while Benjamin in France was basically fighting to survive. Benjamin chose to remain much closer to political reality, however dangerous, than Adorno. Adorno was worried about Benjamin being a reductionist in his notion of the 19th century really. I don’t think that’s the issue. I don’t think that’s a real problem with Benjamin. The problem with Benjamin is precisely the notion of the Messianic. What Benjamin was doing was to develop a kind of Messianic Marxism. I think that’s a real problem. I mean, if you’re trying to save, then you're really betraying this impulse of non-identity. There’s always the theological tendency in Benjamin to see things as redeemable and completed.For example, he says that the origin is the effort to restore something. He says there’s a dialectic there until it lies unfolded the totality of its history. So Benjamin still has this notion of totality.He isn’t Kantian enough. Kant says that you can’t know about the notion of totality. The idea is called reason, but it’s not something you can know anything about. The word Adorno uses in German, as already mentioned, and which he borrows from Hegel, is the word Versöhnung, reconciliation. That also is a Christian notion. For Adorno, the dialectic should bring together the opposite without merging them or forcing them into a union.In his books on cinema, Deleuze writes about interstices as that which determines the relation between things in film. But he talks about Catholic films, above all those of Bresson. Perhaps Adorno wants to think something similar in the idea of “reconciliation” but that would not be ultimately religious.So to go back to your last question, I feel that I’m combining Adorno and Benjamin.

When I was in Frankfurt, it was revealed that Adorno didn’t leave Germany right away after the Nazis took power. Adorno stayed in Germany until 1934, hoping probably that the worst would blow over and pass. He even published a text in a Nazi collection, edited by Baldur von Schirach, who was Leader of the Hitler youth. Adorno published, under a different name, an article about folk music, if I remember correctly. It wasn’t Nazi propaganda, but when this was revealed it caused a terrible scandal. Adorno, who had always presented himself as the victim of Nazism, had been uncompromising in his critique of Heidegger’s complicity with National Socialism, which he felt was reflected in his philosophy.After the revelation of his own behavior, it was speculated that Adorno might have been compensating in part for his own feeling of guilt. His father was a Jewish businessman, but he took the name of his mother and denied his father’s surname. In the 20s and 30s he was known as Theodor Wiesengrund, and his surname – which literally means “meadow ground” recurs in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, By taking his mother’s name he in a way distanced himself from his father’s Jewish side.I don’t want to get into psychoanalysis of Adorno, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were some guilty conscience informing his work. Adorno himself acknowledged that anybody that survived the Holocaust could not help feeling guilty. But in his case there may have been more personal reasons. Did he try to accommodate himself with the New Order, while that still seems vaguely possible? Hard not to think of certain parallels in the behavior of Paul de Man during the early years of the Second World War, despite great differences.

I’m very uncomfortable with it for two reasons. First of all, barbaric is a word for the foreigner who doesn’t speak your language. The Greeks called the non-Greeks barbarian, because they only heard “bar bar bar.” So there’s nothing more barbaric than the word “barbaric.”Adorno should have realized that. Also today in France, for example, the Islamic fundamentalists are called barbaric. The terrorists are barbaric. Everyone calls the other barbaric. The Russians call the Americans barbaric, and the Americans called the Russians barbaric. I think it’s important to take it seriously. The word “barbaric” is a disqualification of the discourse of the Other as incomprehensible. So the whole thing is vitiated by that.Of course I know what Adorno was thinking of there, because all poetry as a construct implies a certain rationality, certain actions of physical violence before, and after Auschwitz everything connected with it.But, the gesture of the “after Auschwitz”—what does “after” mean? Does it mean the years following 1945? In other words, the whole statement is skewed, and that’s precisely what makes it so popular.It simplifies the issues so badly that it can’t really encourage thinking of any kind. And since it doesn’t encourage thinking it’s not really helpful. For anything to be helpful it should encourage thinking. Adorno should have thought about that. Of course he was inveighing against the idea that art and poetry are eternal and in that sense impervious to history. But he himself should have taken words seriously and listen to what they’re saying and their history. Adorno wrote an essay on foreign words (“Wörter aus der Fremde”), where he tells about how the kids made fun of him when he was in school, because he used foreign words. And he tries to argue for the importance of foreign words in our language. He should have been aware that barbarism is a disqualification of the use of foreign language, foreign words, rather than just using the barbaric in a positive, negative way to disqualify.There’s so much you could say about the statement. For example, he didn’t say poetry, he said “lyric,” in German “Lyrik,” which is usually translated as poetry, but it’s not the same thing. The lyrical tradition is much more ego-centered than is the word “poetry,” which is a much larger concept. So what he says is that you can’t take any ego-centered experience after Auschwitz and try to poeticize it, which I think is a very stupid thing to say, because egos continue to exist, and it depends on how they are poeticized.But when you say “Lyrik,” you’re saying it remains somehow indebted to a positive ego, which takes him back to Celan. I think Celan’s poetry is problematic. I’m not such an unconditional Celan admirer. I think he’s a uniquely important poet, but there is a certain amount of self-indulgence in his poetry that has always bothered me. I have mixed feelings about Celan. But I haven’t worked on his poetry and so will limit myself to this.

On the other hand, one could argue that Adorno’s dictum was striking enough to get people to discuss, even negatively, the question of the perennialness of poetry. But it’s really based on a notion of art and poetry that Adorno never accepted. He wrote on Beckett, who didn’t write poetry. So would you say you can’t write prose or you can’t write, Beckett, because of Auschwitz? In some way, Beckett is a kind of meditation of experience after Auschwitz for Adorno, and perhaps in this way more interesting than Celan.Adorno was very positive about Beckett. It has to do with the connotations of the German word “Lyrik.” At the time that Adorno wrote that, there was a standard textbook on the modern Lyrik by a man named Hugo Friedrich, who who wrote on French and modern poetry. He popularized a very traditional notion of lyric poetry as being very centered around the subject. I think that’s the background of what he was thinking: If you think you can take experience from the ego and poeticize it and in any way make it beautiful, you’re betraying the memory about Auschwitz.

Q

Samuel Beckett (1906.4.13 - 1989.11.10)

“审美、社会和指斥理论hg0088官网旅走”国际学术钻研会暖场系列之hg0088现金

A

Can we say that the fluctuant, dubious part of Adornois that, on the one hand, he has this Hegelian teleological tendency, and on the other, it’s non-conceptual and non-identical?